


you can lie with me when you’re half asleep

by honeykaspbrak



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: ANGST!!, Emotional Conversations, Friendship, Gen, Goodbyes, Lots of Crying, Love, M/M, Relationship History, Sadness, Smoking, Symbolism, Talking, Tattoos, i miss these two together, ian and mandy love each other so much okay, ian’s so fuckin sad he misses her so much :(, mandy leaves but not with kenyatta he ain’t in this, sweet brother mickey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:56:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15293001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeykaspbrak/pseuds/honeykaspbrak
Summary: “i love you.” mandy whispers, and ian’s heart shatters into ten billion pieces inside the cavity of his chest. he can feel it piercing his lungs, the spaces between his ribs. those words have never been as fucking heartbreaking, not ever, he’s sure of it. he can’t open his mouth to speak, just sort of sobs into the space between their faces. there’s snot collecting in his nostrils, disgusting but he can’t bear to move his arms from where they’re wrapped around her ribcage.





	you can lie with me when you’re half asleep

**Author's Note:**

> i love ian and mandy together SO MUCH jesus christ :(( i made myself emo writing this

ian is about two and a half seconds away from bursting into tears, he knows this, and she does too; he can see it all over her face. that amazes him, in this tragic, tragic way. to not only be close enough to her that she knows the minute he’ll cry, but that he knows the expression of her knowing. if he tries to think about it too hard he really might sob until they both drown and the whole goddamn earth is washed salty and clean. 

mandy reaches out to him with both hands, fingers pale and thin and nails painted with chipped black polish that ian applied on her back porch a week ago without knowing what would happen. he suddenly wants to go back to that moment so badly that it’s like a wrench around his heart. their knees touching, her fingers splayed over his thighs so he could reach her nails with the tiny polish brush, the sun setting behind a humid mugginess, the warm, golden light on her face as she laughed with her head back and her teeth showing. ian is so scared that he’ll forget that moment, so scared that one day he won’t be able to recall the smell of her hair in the thick breeze, the way her purple-red lipstick tasted on the beer can they shared. 

she takes his face between her palms, pointer finger of her left hand rubbing slow over his earlobe. and that’s the feeling, tender and quiet and almost unspeakably intimate, that makes the tears start up. his eyes burn and he squeezes them shut, feels the hot tears slip down his face easier than anything in his life has ever been. 

mandy leans towards him, presses her forehead into his. whispers, _oh, ian, fuck._ he prays for her to never move an inch, to stay and hold him like this between her head and her smooth hands for the rest of eternity. 

“i don’t want you to go.” he says, so quietly he’s not sure she can hear him. but she gets a hand on the back of his head, like she’s trying to get as close to him as she can, closer still though they’re pressed together from the place where her kneecap meets his shin to where her hair falls against his face and down his neck. 

“i love you.” mandy whispers, and ian’s heart shatters into ten billion pieces inside the cavity of his chest. he can feel it piercing his lungs, the spaces between his ribs. those words have never been as fucking heartbreaking, not ever, he’s sure of it. he can’t open his mouth to speak, just sort of sobs into the space between their faces. there’s snot collecting in his nostrils, disgusting but he can’t bear to move his arms from where they’re wrapped around her ribcage. mandy is something like a bird, always feels so fragile and ceramic when ian hugs her that he has to remind himself that this is the girl who kicked the biggest senior in the school square in the balls when he was roughing up ian in the cafeteria. this is the girl who stole four cases of beer from the store on fifth without setting off the security alarm. this is the girl who set carl’s broken arm when he bailed out on his dirt bike. didn’t even fucking _flinch_ , just lined up her jaw and held him down with a forearm and did it in one smooth, split-second motion. it’s still the most impressive thing ian’s ever seen, hands down. 

this is the girl who’s saying _i love you_ in the empty stretch of frozen grass under the overpass while tears collect in the space under ian’s chin. 

“i love you, mandy.” he’s never been more sure of something in his life. 

she was the one who taught him that you could fall in love with someone you didn’t want to fuck. he remembers her looking up at him over her reading glasses that make her look like a librarian who yells at kids (he used to tease her with that whenever she put them on) and saying “you can tell your friends you love them, dickwad.” he doesn’t remember the context. just her voice saying those words. 

“ian gallagher.” she whispers, and it sounds like she’s about to give a speech at his funeral. “do you wanna know something fucking stupid?”

“yeah.” ian breathes into the pocket of air that’s warm between them from their exhales. nothing mandy has ever said has been fucking stupid. 

“i think you’re the love of my life.” she says it just like that, all matter of fact, and it knocks ian off his feet. 

he knows what she means, is the thing. he feels it too. something, deep down under his ribs, knows that mandy is the only one who is ever going to get him this well. he’s never going to know someone again who understands him like she does. he’s never going to know someone else who he’s held on the bathroom floor as her nose gushes blood and her brother beats her sack-of-shit junior year fuckbuddy half to death in the front yard. she has been here. she knows his family, she knows what being born here does to you. 

“i think that makes a lot of sense.” his throat closes up too much to say more, to say _you mean more to me than the whole rest of this city combined, you’re my family, you’re the best thing about me_. but she smiles like she gets it (she definitely gets it; she gets everything).

“you know why i have to leave, right?” her voice sounds so sad that ian just wants to pick her up and hold her to his chest and protect her forever. mandy doesn’t need anyone to protect her (ian knows this, he’s known this since the first minute he saw her) but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to. 

“no.” he says, even though he _does_ know. he’s being childish and difficult, he knows that, but his chest hurts so much that he can’t _not_ put up a weak fight for her to stay. 

“ian...” she murmurs. he suddenly can’t stand the thought of not seeing her lips form the letters of his name every day of his life. he hasn’t spent more than three days apart from her in five years. he knows it makes him the asshole, the anchor, the rat trap, but she _cannot leave_.

“mands, i can’t be here by myself.” he sounds so selfish, even to his own ears, but he can’t make his mouth stop. 

her fingers curl tighter into his hair. there are tear tracks down her face, carrying mascara over the slopes of her cheeks. 

“you’re gonna be okay, you know? it’s gonna be fine.” mandy sounds like she’s trying to convince herself as much as she is ian. 

he drops his head to her shoulder. he’s freezing, suddenly, freezing and exhausted and he just wants to lay down next to her and sleep until it all goes away.

she takes a ragged breath and in it he hears the last five years. he feels her small, bruised hands seizing his collar as a freshman, eyes hurt and disbelieving until he forced his mouth to form the words _mandy, i’m gay_. he sees the tiny pen sketches and scrawled song lyrics that she would cover his legs and forearms with every time they sat together to watch a movie or get high or just stare into the distance in company. he feels her hair on his face from when she spent almost all of sophomore year sleeping in his bed. he hears her laughter and her sobs and her steady, quiet breathing, _five years_ of it. that’s not something you can let go. not easily. 

“you’re gonna make it, mands.” he doesn’t know exactly why he says it, just that her face is crumpled and he realizes that she’s as scared of this as he is. 

“yeah?” she murmurs into the top of his head, voice high and strained. 

“yeah.” he whispers. she will. she’s the smartest person he knows, smarter than lip. she’s good with people, she’s scrappy, she’s intuitive and strong and can throw punches and drink grown men under tables. she will be fine, she will make it out of this neighborhood, she will become bigger than all the rest of them. she’ll be fine, but will ian?

“i’ll visit, okay?” ian pulls his head off her shoulder and presses his lips to hers in a chaste peck, just to make her stop talking, to stop making it all sound so final ( _just felt like kissing my boyfriend_ ). 

“gallagher.” she murmurs when he pulls back. there are tears suspended on her eyelashes, making her look snow-dipped and glittery. “fuck, ian, you should’ve been straight.” she’s giving him this small, conspiring smile that he’s seen so many times before in his lifetime, and he can’t help but laugh. 

“maybe i should’ve been.” he says, chest thick with laughter and tears and _mandy_. he sees it for a second, the whole life they could’ve had together. mandy, with a ring on her left hand and a different last name (maybe. she was never sure whether she’d change it). a small house with tea towels in the kitchen. her eyeliner on the counter and her lipstick on his face. kids with red hair and her huge brown eyes. “do you think we’d be good parents?”

she takes a breath, and he hears it catch in her throat. “we’d be better than ours.” 

—

they go down to the water in the wee hours of the morning, mandy’s high-top clad heels crunching where they dig into the frosted grass. she’s cold, ian can tell, though she’ll never say it. she’s too proud to take his coat, so he just grabs her hand and pulls her into his side to try to give her some of his body heat. she smiles over at him. 

he doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do on their last night together. there have been so many nights together, most of them nothing to write home about, but this is the _last one_. in the morning she’ll be on a plane, ten thousand feet in the air, and he will be here. 

they end up laying on the banks of the lake, her head on his chest and his arm wrapped around her shoulders. the stars stretching out above them are almost brilliant, would be without light pollution. but it’s dark enough here, dark enough that ian can stare straight up into the sky and forget everything but the galaxies around them and mandy’s cheek pressed over his heart. 

her flight is in seven hours, then six, then the day is coming up on the other side of the water and the sky is going all dusty-purple and the prologue of the winter sun on her face makes her look at once ghostly and lit-from-within. ian has the idea to tattoo her name on his ribs or his collarbone. maybe something less obvious, a daisy like the ones that grow in her backyard that she picks and tucks in his hair in the late spring. or the title of that song that she cries to, or a knife, as some dumb symbolic representation of her inner strength or whatever, or the sun coming over the chicago skyline for this very moment. fuck it, he’ll probably just get her name. 

they go from barely talking to talking about anything, everything, interrupting each other and tripping over words in a desperate attempt to get everything out in the air between them. the sun rises, steadily, like a grisly countdown to an execution. 

four hours, three, and then she’s standing and saying “i can’t be late to the airport” and ian’s already-broken heart is being ground into dust. 

he walks her home, stands in her living room while she double checks her luggage and puts her wallet and lipstick in her purse.

mickey takes mandy out on the front porch for a few minutes, for goodbyes, and ian sits on the stained couch and smokes a whole square at light-speed, tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. then mickey is back, pulling ian off the couch and into a hug. the fucking milkovich siblings. how did ian get so wrapped up in not one but _two_? how is it that, between them, they encompass almost everything about him?

“get her on that plane safe, okay?” mickey murmurs into his neck, sends him out the front door with a kiss to the temple to where mandy is standing with her luggage, dabbing her eyes with a folded kleenex. 

“to o’hare, my lady?” he says, because if he doesn’t make this a joke he’ll break down. 

“that’s right.” she responds, voice shaky but a thin, grateful smile playing on her lips.

she plays an album that he bought her on cd for her sixteenth birthday while they drive, singing along under her breath. he doesn’t let go of her hand. when he sees the first sign for the airport, the tears start again and don’t stop. he can hear her crying in the passenger seat, but if he looks over, he doesn’t know what’ll happen. he keeps his eyes on the road. 

he walks her in, wheeling one of her suitcases behind him. they find her boarding area and sit against the wall of windows where they can watch the planes come and go off the runways. ian doesn’t like airports, he decides. they feel almost hospital-like in their clinical timeliness. 

“you know you can come home anytime, right?” he says to her. “just call me and i’ll get you the money for a ticket. okay?”

“okay, ian.” he loves her voice so much. he can’t imagine not hearing it every day. “i’ll call.”

“and call me for other stuff too. just to talk.”

“i will.” her voice goes quietly strained and shuts off, like she’s trying not to cry. he’s still holding her hand. 

“ _flight number 379, from chicago to los angeles, boarding now._ ” he knows that’s her, but tries to ignore it anyways. she stands up on shaky legs, smiles all watery down at him. he has the sudden urge to pick her up and run away with her, to somewhere that neither of them will ever feel like they need to escape from. 

“ian.” she’s saying, and her voice sounds so far away. “i gotta go.” she kneels back down in front of him, gets her arms around his shoulders and hugs him so tight that it’s like she’s trying to press him back together. “i love you. i’ll call. i love you.” she’s crying, voice hardly understandable. 

then ian’s saying “ _i love you, mandy, i love you so much, please call._ ” but it doesn’t really sound like his voice and he’s so scared suddenly that he wants to lay down on the floor and dissolve. instead he stands, gives her a proper hug and a kiss on both cheeks, and stays stock still as he watches her walk through the line. he keeps his eyes locked on her until she disappears down the hallway that’ll take her to the plane. that’ll take her away from him. 

he has to sit in the car on the asphalt until he’s not crying so hard that he’ll crash it if he tries to drive. he goes home, considers going to mickey but doesn’t want to be inside the house where she is not, and gets into bed with his parka still on. 

when he wakes up in the late afternoon with swollen eyes, he has three texts from her. 

_just landed in LA. it’s warm, which is weird. i already miss you so much. (especially because i have to buy my own coffees now.) i love you._

the second is a selfie, her with a palm tree in the background and her mouth open in an “o”. mandy always wanted to end up on a beach. 

the last text just reads _see you soon, okay?_

ian sits up, scrubs at his eyes, and makes an 8:30 pm appointment at the tattoo parlor.

**Author's Note:**

> fuck. i miss mands. comment and lmk how you all liked this!
> 
> ALSO! some news! i made an email account for y’all to send questions/prompts/rants about carl gallagher/anything else you want to! it’s cfgwrites@gmail.com, hmu!!


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